


Oyster Catching

by Jaydeun



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Ducks, Fluff, Idiots in Love, Light Angst, M/M, Oblivious Aziraphale (Good Omens), Pining, Sex Talk, Softie Crowley (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-09-02 15:36:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20248543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaydeun/pseuds/Jaydeun
Summary: Ducks. Crowley winced. Ducks fucking, he corrected. Energetically. And with much quacking.“Some modestly, for Hell’s sake,” he hissed at the pair. Ducks do not care about modesty, however. Nor did a number of young, underclad humans he spied on blankets in the surprising London sunshine. Amazing the way they popped up on lawns with picnics the minute even a pretense of summer suggested itself. Bodies all over the place. Eating, mostly. And doing a preamble to what the ducks were up to, he supposed.  Complicated stuff.…in which Crowley and Aziraphale consider a body problem from very different angles.





	Oyster Catching

**Author's Note:**

> This work was created for the 2019 Good Omens fan exchange, on Twitter as #GOFanExchange.  
Prompt: Crowley thinks Aziraphale will never want to be sexual with him because it's just too blatant a sin.  
Aziraphale thinks Crowley will never want to be sexual with him because making love is one of the most holy experiences. Also they're both capital D dumb.
> 
> An additional note follows the text!

_Ducks_. Crowley winced. Ducks _fucking_, he corrected. Energetically. And with much quacking.

“Some modestly, for Hell’s sake,” he hissed at the pair. Ducks do not care about modesty, however. Nor did a number of young, underclad humans he spied on blankets in the surprising London sunshine. Amazing the way they popped up on lawns with picnics the minute even a pretense of summer suggested itself. Bodies all over the place. Eating, mostly. And doing a preamble to what the ducks were up to, he supposed. Complicated stuff.

Of course, eating was complicated, too. There was a lot of chewing involved, which Crowley sometimes forgot to do, and when you _did_ it meant food stuck in your teeth. Oh, he wasn’t a purist or anything. He liked a good meal (he liked a nap after even more), but bodies—well. You could keep one going demonically without any food at all, but once you put food IN it, it had to get OUT again. He didn’t mind taking the occasional piss, but could really do without the other one. Crowley brought this up to Azriaphale exactly once, in Rome, during the oyster ordeal. The angel only smiled in that silly soft way of his; “Some things are just worth it,” he’d said. Crowley did not see how oysters could be one of them.

And ducks. That’s essentially all they did, wasn’t it? Eating. Shitting. Of course, ducks could swim. And fly. He drew his brows together over dark sunglasses. Flying and swimming in a single creature; bit odd, wasn’t it? Made you wonder what She was thinking. Eating, shitting, flying, swimming…and fucking. Crowley slid off the bench and made his way back across the park. Back in Eden, he’d thought _Lucifer_ invented sex. Partly because Lucifer took credit. And then there was that whole confusion about original sin. Sex certainly _was_ a sure way of causing trouble in human populations, of course. If a demon was having a slow night, you could always tempt someone into the wrong bed, just to even out the quarterly reports and what not. It lacked style, though. And anyway, once you realized all mammals (and birds and reptiles and squids and slugs and everything else) went about shagging each other, you had to recognize it as part of the whole “be fruitful” mandate. It was, to put it mildly, a “God” thing. At least for humans. Angels, fallen or otherwise, didn’t have that directive. Of course, they didn’t have a directive to eat, either, and Aziraphale—

“_Hnk-rk,”_ Crowley rolled his tongue like he’d just whiskey-binged two nights straight. _Stop that. _No putting Aziraphale and sex in the same thought sentence. You might as well burn down his bookshop while you’re at it. Sex and angels had sin written all over it. Humans had the equipment and desire built in, standard. But an angel…or a demon…you were working against designs. Against the rules. Maybe THE rule. Satan, fallen angel number one, it’s what he got up to first thing. You want original sin, then _that’s_ where to find it. It’s not allowed. Not to…_not to us_.

“Bastard fucking ducks,” Crowley muttered, and headed for the Bentley.

***

Aziraphale’s bookshop wasn’t far from the park, but it took Crowley an hour to reach it. He had to scramble the street lights and cause at least three people to lock keys in their cars before he felt like himself again. But in scrambling the street lights, he’d mucked up traffic rather a lot.

“Sorry m’late,” he said as he breezed through the door, snapping it closed behind him. Aziraphale was sitting at his desk, but fairly jumped up when he saw him. Like soda under pressure.

“New edition of something obscure come in, I take it?” Crowley drawled. Aziraphale gave him one of those ridiculous apple-cheeked nose wrinkles.

“No! But I have _just_ been thinking about sex,” he said.

Three things happened at once.

First, Crowley looked behind him. This might not seem a very sensible thing to do, but he’d just had the fearful impression that a white board stood behind him with a bulleted list of his thoughts from earlier. Second, at relief that no such board had manifested, he sat on the nearest surface, which was not a chair but a curio table, and displaced stacks of mail and last month’s copy of _Modern Welshman_. Third, and most inconveniently, he’d just lost the ability to use words.

“Hrk?” he asked. “Pffffbt?”

“Sex,” Aziraphale repeated. “You know, it’s when—“

“I _know_ what it _is_,” Crowley managed. Aziraphale clapped his hands as though Crowley just gave the correct answer at a pub quiz.

“Oh good!” He sat down at his desk, crossed one leg over the other and placed both hands in a knot at his knee. “So if you were to give advice, what might you say?”

Crowley could not actually drown, but he had a pretty good idea about what it must feel like.

“_Advice_? Me??” he croaked, followed by a silent _forwhowhydidyouwho__whowho__?_

“Oh. ” Aziraphale’s brows knit. “I thought—I’m terribly sorry. I should have known you wouldn’t—ah—that is, I suppose demons avoid sex the same way they avoid holy water?”

_ I’ve been hit over the head by Beelzebub and a pack of rogue demons and this is some sort of hallucination,_ Crowley thought. He took off his glasses to stare dumbly at Aziraphale.

“Holy water. And sex.”

“Well,” Aziraphale fussed with his coat lapels. “Not an exact comparison, I’ll grant you. But they are both holy in a general sense.”

Crowley rubbed his face vigorously. The words _holy fuck_ just appeared in his brain and he could not unthink it. The angel was thinking about sex. And he was asking Crowley…? What exactly? Did Crowley think about sex? Yes. Well, after a fashion. He had the equipment much the same way he had a digestive system. He knew how it _worked_. He hadn’t actually tried it. He knew other demons had gone native in their own ways, but he hadn’t had a reason. Or rather, he didn’t have an object. _Fuck_. No, the problem was he did, but. No. That _wasn’t _what Aziraphale was asking. _Don’t even think it_, he told himself. He also realized that the angel had kept talking, in his tartan vest with that stupid, marvelous bowtie, beaming and expectant. And Crowley had missed the entire thing.

“Um?” he managed. And the confusion must have been entirely apparent, because Aziraphale smiled indulgently.

“I want you to come with me to Anathema and Newt’s wedding. You were invited, you know. And I thought we could help. Young people do need direction in these matters. I thought maybe a pep talk? Prepare the troops and all that?” The angel twisted his hands together the way he did when he was about to admit something rather less than heavenly. “Eh. Madame Tracey knows a _surprising_ amount about human sex, did you know? Sharing a body with her was very, em, instructive. I learned ever so much, and—”

Crowley slid off the table and pooled onto the floor.

“Good heavens, Crowley! What ever is the matter?” Aziraphale was on his feet in a moment, though Crowley could only make out the angel’s camel-colored oxfords from his present position.

“I need a drink,” he grunted. Aziraphale clucked like a nervous hen.

“Oh, this is my fault! I should have _known _how much this would unsettle you. I just thought, after all this time—and Armageddon, too—” The angel gave a cheerful noc. “Please do get up, dear. You shouldn’t do that to your spine.”

A lot of gears were grinding for Crowley, all right, but none of them vertebral. He managed to slither into a sitting position, however, legs more or less at proper angles.

“Look, can we go back a bit? You’re telling me you’ve been sitting in here thinking about sex all day?” He still needed that drink.

“Well I did spend the better part of 6000 years blessing marriage beds, you know.” Aziraphale sniffed. “It required a good deal of thinking about.”

Crowley took a long breath (partly because he hadn’t been taking them for the last five minutes). Then he started speaking, very slowly, as if trying out the words.

“I—I just didn’t know. It’s always seemed,” he waved his hands around in a sort of aimless sigil, “_beneath _you.”

“Oh. I see.” Aziraphale’s words came out short, like little gasps. Like it hurt. “I suppose it’s beneath _you__,_ is it?”

“No!” Crowley tried standing, hit his head on the table, and came right back down again. “_Fuck. _No, angel.”

“Then why would you say such a thing?” Aziraphale pouted. Crowley watched the sad bottom lip and swallowed with difficulty.

“Because _I _am beneath you.” He’d not entirely realized what he’d just admitted, which was the only reason he kept going. “I thought you wouldn’t like it; er—to _think_ about it. To be part of it. Because. Well, because_ I_ think about it,” he finished miserably. “And about—ducks.”

“Ducks, Crowley?” Aziraphale asked. His eyes were open wide, blue irises swimming in their whites. He’d lowered himself to sitting now as well, both of them crouched beneath a table in the dusty bookshop. There was something surprisingly _still _about the way he said it. As if he thought Crowley might bolt at the least startle.

“Yeah, ducks. And oysters.”

“And sex?” Aziraphale asked. Crowley writhed uncomfortably.

“They just—everyone, all of ‘em, all the time—and it’s _fine_. But not us. Never—” he gulped air. “Never us.”

Crowley didn’t catch his own mistake. But angels were wonderful at such things.

“The _two of us_, you mean?” Aziraphale asked, ever so gently, and Crowley tried very hard to discorporate himself out of existence or, failing that, to saunter vaguely through the floor boards. NO. Yes? Of course not. Nope. Maybe?

“Not with—I mean. I’m _fallen_.”

“Under a table,” Aziraphale agreed. Crowley’s yellow eyes snapped up at being teased; he could tease in a moment like this? The angel only smiled indulgently. “Whoever did you think invented sex, Crowley? Satan? Really, dear. The holiest thing in the world! I think not.”

“See?” Crowley growled, but the angel shook his head. “That’s why you can’t—”

“Tut. I’m not agreeing with you, my dear. I’m just pointing out the obvious. You said _not us. _And that simply isn’t true.” Aziraphale rested his chin on his hands and looked somewhere left of Crowley’s eyes. “It’s not terribly necessary for celestial bodies, who could share atoms if they wanted to. It’s more an earthly sort of thing. And anyway, Crowley, it’s not out of the question.”

“It’s. Not.” Crowley’s voice was shaking. Because he was. It really wasn’t fair at all.

“Well? Why would it be? We do everything else in these bodies. I haven’t especially given it a go, but, erm. Well.” Now, for the first time, a faint blush spread over Aziraphale’s face, and it served him right, dammit. “Who with, really?”

Crowley’s stomach (which he scarcely ever used anyway) just dropped through his feet. The blush was still there, spreading over Aziraphale’s lovely face. And getting deeper, apparently.

“So. You think of sex, do you? Not just the tempting bit? That’s. Good. It’s—ah. A holy thing. Don’t you think? Even with its _complexities_?”

One of Aziraphale’s hands had dropped, just in reach of Crowley’s. It seemed like an invitation. So he took it—just barely, at first. No lightning strike. No fire of retribution. Nothing but two idiots under a table blushing like mad in their stupid bodies. Crowley cleared his throat.

“You once asked if I’d ever eaten an oyster,” he said. Aziraphale brightened.

“In Rome! You hadn’t. And you _still _haven’t—I couldn’t tempt you after all!” He said, and there was something painfully sweet in it, honey with a sting. Crowley squeezed his hand and watched Aziraphale go pink in the face all over again. He’d come to take the angel to lunch, and now he knew exactly where they would go.

“I’d like to try, now,” he said.

“Really?” Aziraphale met his eyes, his naked snake-slit eyes, which had gone a bit watery.

“You said it, angel. Some things are worth the effort.”

NOTE:

All right, I am a historian so many apologies for the title… “Oyster-catching” is a late 17th century euphemism for ‘the act of intimacy.’ Both the female genitalia and the male seed were described as oysters or oyster pearls. What can I say, we hadn’t gotten to the Age of Enlightenment yet, with its more colorful and varied ways of describing sex in all its glory.


End file.
